What say the biologists? (If anything?)
Is a beehive an organism?
If it’s not (as) obvious (as I think it is) why I’m asking, please tell me so, and I’ll clarify.
-FrL-
Are you asking about beehives as in the structure that bees make? Because I don’t think so…it’s quite dead, and made of products.
If you’re asking if a swarm of bees can be likened to something like the sponge, the “lowest” phylum…I don’t think so either. Any “cell” of a sponge can break off and become another sponge, even if it’s specialized in function in the sponge it was originally in. Bees have genders and “social roles” and a drone can’t become a queen.
Am I aiming right? Or were you asking something else?
Thanks Merry.
I meant the swarm, I guess, though I might count the hive itself as par of the organism in the same sense I might count a clam’s shell as part of its organism. (Do biologists count the shell as part of the organism?)
I was thinking something like a very rough analogy: An individual bee is to the swarm as a human’s individual cell is to the human. So it’s not necessary that an individual bee be able to form its own swarm, just as it’s not necessary that an individual human cell be able to form a new human being.
So anway, it seems to me the swarm as a whole, as a unit, reproduces, metabolizes, etc. This makes it look like a single organism to me.
-FrL-
There have been suggestions that social insects like bees, ants and termites form “superorganisms”, but I don’t know how seriously the idea has been taken.
Yeah, as Rysto says, the term “superorganism” is sometimes used. One way in which the individuals that make up the colony are not analogous to the cells of a multicellular organism is that the colony members are not 100% related.